[l-albertovich]

I'm sure that there's a good reason to do it this way but I was wondering what would the benefits of doing it this way instead of installing openwatcom using whisky.

A few weeks ago I gave it a chance out of curiosity because I wanted to run total comander and was pleasantly surprised of how well it worked which makes me think that it should be able to run openwatcom perfectly.

Side note: in the end, even though TC worked great I just crossed that item from my ToDo and continued using double commander (although the search feature is much better in TC).

[polpo]

It runs natively, not under emulation, and can integrate with any other build system that you have running natively. Granted, if you're building DOS apps, the overhead of running the x64 version of OpenWatcom in emulation probably isn't bad as it's still orders of magnitude faster than it was back in the day.

I also do retro development on an Apple Silicon device, and like the author I built OpenWatcom so I could run it natively. I have it tied into the build system for the rest of my project and it works great.